Eight months ago, as the risk of sovereign default in Greece first emerged, the Intereconomics Forum invited a number of contributors to examine the options available to EU policymakers. As the threats to European Monetary Union resurface now, six of the same authors return in this issue's Forum...

While past discussions on EMU tended to emphasise its role in limiting the impact of the global financial crisis on the euro area countries, the focus has now shifted to the destabilising effects threatening the entire euro zone as a consequence of the dire fiscal situation in some weaker member...

Promoting employment at low earnings figures prominently in several debates on how to make the German social welfare system more prone to job creation. In the U.S., about 15% of all civilian jobs are subsidized via the Earned Income Tax Credit, a transfer program that refunds income taxes beyond...

Armed with the knowledge of today, a scholar revisits the US historical experience with fiscal federalism and learns how it avoided three pitfalls now facing the euro area.The lingering crisis of the euro area has made leading observers call for the completion of the economic and monetary union...

Fiscal surveillance was developed as a supranational regulatory process to counteract short-termism and deficit biases in government decision-making. With effective monetary policy to stabilize the economy, restraint on the fiscal discretion of national governments was seen as the key to...

The crisis since August 2007 provides an opportunity to observe the workings of good governance institutions under an extreme stress test and in radically different political settings. Institutions such as independent central banks, fiscal rules and regulatory oversight of public finances were...

The sharp rise in household finance, both in debt and in assets, is one of the striking empirical facts about the US economy of the last two decades. But it is still not clear what caused it. Economists, both mainstream and heterodox, seek an explanation in financial market innovation and...